The Brain

[TotallyOz]

I have been using a new program which I am in love with. It is called The Brain. www.thebrain.com

Mirroring the way a human thinks is a tough job for software, but PersonalBrain 4.5, a powerful brainstorming and knowledge management tool, falls just shy of artificial intelligence.

PersonalBrain expresses individual topics as nodes in a mind map, a 3-D representation of the relationships between topics. This mind map is referred to as a Brain. Topics in PersonalBrain parlance are called thoughts. Main thoughts (called Parent thoughts) can have Child thoughts (thoughts related to the main or parent thought), Siblings (thoughts related to the child thoughts), and Jumps (links to different thoughts).

To create a Brain, you start by entering a single thought and begin connecting it together with other thoughts. A thought can represent any type of information: it could be as simple as a person's name or as rich as a photograph of that person. The result, if done carefully, can be a useful means of visually mapping the naturally interconnected thoughts swirling around in your (physical) brain. Any thought can be related to any other thought and to as many thoughts as necessary. That means that you can take different paths to the same thought, depending on context, which is not unlike the way people really think.

Thoughts can include styled notes, attached files, Web pages, and even applications, turning the Brain into a centralized hub for all of your activities. Folders can even be imported en masse, with each file and subfolder automatically becoming an individual thought. Images can be previewed from within a Brain.

Wrapping your own brain around PersonalBrain may take some doing. Although it can be used for many of the same things as a traditional outliner, it works entirely differently. Anything can be linked to anything else, a free-form approach that may leave you wondering where to begin. The payoff is much greater flexibility in how you organize information.

Click on a thought and it becomes the main thought (showing up in the center of the software's main window) with all of its related thoughts surrounding it. It's like looking at a map of the solar system, except that instead of planets, each node represents an individual thought.

The idea behind PersonalBrain is that by connecting thoughts within a dynamic visual interface that can be reorganized with a single click, people will be able to better understand relationships among their information. Usage scenarios are as varied as the individuals who use it: to do lists, presentations, genealogy, and general research are but a few examples. Brains can be created around specific interests, projects, or events. Or you can get really ambitious and try to map everything in your life into a single monster Brain.

Although this is the first version of PersonalBrain for the Mac, the program has been around for years. So it's not surprising that the mind maps PersonalBrain produces can become quite complex and difficult to navigate. To ease navigation, PersonalBrain provides Pins that act as bookmarks, along with a breadcrumb display and a capable search function.

For the rest of the article:

http://www.macworld.com/article/134792/200...nalbrain45.html